Guake terminal

Guake - Useful terminal

Today, I would love to share with you a very simple, but useful tool. I use it for years now, and I think it is irreplaceable. This is Guake terminal.

What is Guake?

It is a drop-down terminal for Linux with GNOME Desktop Environment. When you use KDE Desktop Environment, you can check the Yakuake terminal. It’s similar to Guake. OK, but I don’t know which Desktop Environment I use? By default, GNOME is used by systems such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint. So, if you use any of those Linux distributions, you probably use GNOME.

Advantages of Guake

Guake is a simple tool. After you download and install Guake, you can start using this tool. Then whenever you press the F12 key, you will see the terminal on the top of your screen. Press F12 key again, the terminal will be gone.

This terminal is very useful. It is available all the time. When you press the F12 key, it will pop up again. Besides that, you can open many tabs on Guake. I work on Guake with 3 or 4 tabs. First for server, second for Ruby console, third for git, and last one for running tests.

I like this tool very much. Especially, after I configured it to launch with a system. I don’t need to think about running the terminal anymore. I just press F12 key, and that’s it. In a fast and easy way, I have access to all my open terminal tabs. And most important, I can use Guake without a mouse, using only the keyboard. It’s very important to me when I use a laptop where I have only the touchpad.

Guake - Keyboard shortcuts

If you like to use Guake without mouse, like I do, check out Guake keyboard shortcuts:

  • F12 - show/hide Guake
  • F11 - full screen Guake
  • F2 - change name of cart
  • Ctrl + Shift + T - open new cart
  • Ctrl + Shift + W - close current cart
  • Ctrl + Shift + Q - close Guake
  • Ctrl + Shift + R - rename current cart
  • Ctrl + ↑, ↓ - resize Guake
  • Ctrl + Pg Up/Pg Dn - change current cart to left/right site cart
  • Ctrl + Shift + C - copy selected text from console
  • Ctrl + Shift + V - paste selected text to console
  • Shift + Home/End - show begin/end of console buffer
  • Shift + Pg Up/Pg Dn - show up/down console screen

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